Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti

German humor escapes me

Despite his Italian-sounding name, Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria of Spanish and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Over the course of his life he resided in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and England and eventually became a British citizen. He won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, a victory claimed by both Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. Canetti wrote his literary works, however, in the German language. His 1935 novel Die Blendung has been published in English translation as Auto-da-Fé and/or The Tower of Babel. The novel takes place in an unspecified European city, though there are a few indications that the characters are speaking German. The term “auto-da-fé” refers to a public punishment inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition, often in the form of burning victims at the stake. Both of the English titles are metaphorical, not literal.

Peter Kien is the Western world’s leading sinologist (scholar of Chinese philology) and the owner of a private library of rare and important books on the subject. He leads a reclusive and regimented life spent mostly within his apartment of four rooms, the walls of which are covered floor to ceiling with books. The first two chapters of this novel start out with great promise. Kien’s intellectual pursuits could possibly serve as the basis for an intelligent and engaging novel. Kien is also an extreme misanthrope who stoically critiques the idiocy of all the human beings he encounters. This dark outlook on mankind also intrigues the reader, who wonders if Kien is just a surly curmudgeon or a potential serial killer.

Auto-da-Fé never lives up to the promise of those first two chapters. It immediately takes a left turn into a slapstick comedy about henpecked husbands and shrewish wives. Like most Nobel laureates, Canetti has received much critical and popular praise. I read several reviews online that made it sound like Auto-da-Fé was not only Canetti’s greatest work but also one of the best novels of the last century. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find that his novel is terrible! I’m guessing that Canetti was going for an absurdist humor somewhere along the lines of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (1938) or Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1928), neither of which I liked, but Auto-da-Fé is not even absurdist, it’s just asinine. Nor is it the least bit fun. In fact, it is incredibly tedious to slog through insanely long chapters in which the characters grind their way through interminable conversations and capers that amount to nothing. This novel is an even more colossal waste of time than The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, another Nobel-hallowed work of German-language humor that I didn’t get. Late in the book, there is a serious chapter dealing with childhood sexual abuse. It is handled very well, which makes one think that Canetti might actually be a very good writer if he would stay away from comedy.

Perhaps one reason critics and “intellectuals” praise this book is because one of its themes is the love of books. Beyond those first two chapters, however, the books in question are not discussed in any way intelligently. Kien, contrary to his personality and his profession, values all books indiscriminately as if they were just bricks of paper whose contents are irrelevant. Another defiance of logic is the fact that Kien seems to have an unlimited supply of money at hand. If pointless silliness isn’t enough to put you off this book, Canetti also provides many derogatory comments towards women and Jews. Defenders might say, “Those are the characters speaking, not the author.” Canetti himself is of Jewish heritage, so perhaps he’s criticizing anti-Semitism instead of Semitism. However, when three of the main male characters are extreme misogynists, two others are womanizers, the only female character is portrayed very negatively, and the reader has to sit through lengthy sermons about how women are simply evil, isn’t it safe to say the novel itself is misogynistic?